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Americans are lucky to have Trump as President

After the election, I made the point that Trump was a warning shot to the ruling class. They had to reform and Trump was that opening for them. If not, the next guy was not going to be as easy to deal with as Trump.

It’s been almost 10 months since Trump’s election and still the ruling classes and those who support them, on both sides of the Atlantic, haven’t yet worked out why.

Last week, the German magazines Der Spiegel and Stern ran these on their front covers:

If social media is anything to go by, a lot of people out there claim to believe Trump is a white supremacist Nazi. The logic goes something like this:

1. Some Nazis protested the removal of a statue in Charlottesville.

2. They were joined by the alt-right, some of whom are Nazis, some of whom are rather unpleasant right-wingers, some of whom are perfectly pleasant right-wingers and some of whom are just ordinary people who want to express their dislike of liberal politics.

3. People who hate Trump demanded he condemn the entire alt-right as Nazis, i.e. to tell a barefaced lie about one of his main political support bases. Trump declined, and condemned the idiots on both sides.

4. Trump is therefore a Nazi.

Apparently this New York property developer with a Jewish daughter, a TV celebrity who has been a household name since the eighties, is a Nazi. Who knew?

Of course, nobody believes Trump is a Nazi: if they did, they’d not be writing articles in papers using their own names calling him a Nazi, they’d be shitting themselves with fear. The Nazi label is simply the latest attempt to pin something on Trump which they hope will bring about enough pressure to get him to resign or be forced from office. We’ve had misogyny, taxes, and collusion with Russia and none of them worked, so they’ve gone with Trump’s a Nazi. Trump’s opponents are simply lurching from one baseless accusation to another in the hope the American public will at some point agree on one of them and turf him from office. They then assume everything will go back to how it was, with nice Republicans like Mitt Romney losing elections (while being called a Nazi) to an exotic Democrat who will focus on transgender bathrooms and global warming.

The way things are going, it wouldn’t surprise me if they succeed in preventing Trump seeing out his term. If this happens, many people will be absolutely ecstatic because they genuinely think this is all about Trump. It still staggers me the number of supposedly intelligent people who claim to follow politics and think that Trump is responsible for the social disintegration we’re seeing across America. Almost nobody from the chattering classes has bothered to identify and understand the political forces that plucked Trump from the primaries and propelled him to the White House, nor the rot that has set into the established political parties in the US which played an equally important role.

The chattering classes in Turkey had no problem ridiculing Recep Erdoğan during his slow rise to power either, confident they could contain him while dismissing his supporters as backward reactionaries that could be defeated by sophisticated discussions among themselves. At no point did the elites in Ankara and Istanbul listen to his supporters to figure out why they were voting for him, and look at ways to persuade these millions of people to come on board with their own policies. Perhaps they believed that beating him at the ballot box wasn’t necessary and they could just remove someone who didn’t do their bidding by other means? And look how that worked out.

Personally, I think Americans are incredibly lucky to have someone as benign as Trump being the one who stumbled on enough populist anger to get himself elected. If remarks about pussy-grabbing and over-zealous tweeting are their biggest concerns, they’re getting off rather lightly. The trouble is, the established order seems determined to ignore their good fortune and roll the dice again. Rather than trying to find out how Trump got elected and why, i.e. by identifying with those who voted for him and persuading them to vote differently, they think the answer lies in getting rid of him unfairly and installing someone else more to their liking. Trump’s successor, whoever he may be (and I don’t mean Pence), will quietly note that the rules have changed and will enter the arena far better prepared. If Trump does not see out his term, American politics will have changed forever, and not in a good way.

People like to compare Trump with Erdoğan, but they probably know little about either beyond what they read in their social media bubbles or the hysterical mainstream media. The irony is that by trying so hard to depose Trump instead of understanding who elected him and why, America’s ruling classes and their useful idiots abroad are making it far more likely that his successor will indeed have much in common with his Turkish counterpart. If they had any sense they’d quit trying to get rid of Trump and let him complete his term, because if they don’t they will – as my mother used to say – really have something to cry about.

38 thoughts on “Americans are lucky to have Trump as President”

I have said this before, and no doubt will again, but the venom of the main stream media in pushing one narrow agenda was unthinkable even thirty years ago. We actually had press freedom and balance which is pretty much gone now.

For a time, after the understandable necessities of war-time propaganda and suppressed news (no one was in any sort of a hurry to tell a population under constant air attacks that we had lost two battleships to the Japanese in one fight) we could enjoy a truly free press where issues could be reported as they were. Of course, there was obfuscation and lies; it took the Profumo affair to blow the lid open of what was happening under the then Tory government. But with the advent of the internet the elite closed ranks, and with them came the journalists and hacks and ‘opinion makers’ who did not want to report news in any sort of balanced way.

Even the humble news reader was encouraged to show emotion and frowns over what they read on the autocue, and every hack thought their opinion — woven into the news — was all that mattered. They were of course only writing and broadcasting for the benefit of their friends, and knowing they would get pats on the back from their kind over cheese and wine at exclusive parties where the hoi-polloi would never touch them. The peasants just bought the papers and paid the TV tax, so screw them, hey?

And then there is August boredom. Too many peasants going on holidays, not making ‘news’ (and there was too much ‘news’ of bombings and FGM and all that to be ignored) so bored journalists, when not reporting on dog surfing championships, resort to making up stories. The more lurid and outlandish the better, and what is more emotive than the ‘Nazis’? So handy, so available, so much like the Commies who used to murder people… No wait, don’t print the last bit.

Of course, it is only opinion. An approved opinion, true, and well received by fellow journos. That’s all that matters; the truth was lost many years ago and objectivity is now a dishonoured ideal, so what the hell? You could be fair but who pays for fairness and balance when you can be exciting?

Of course Trump is not a Nazi. It would be like accusing Merkel of being a Commie given her upbringing… oops, that must not be said. Nasty me.

But as people whose grandparents went to fight the real Nazis could be accused of being of that dogma. Hey, this journalism shit is easy, hey? It is easy to say things and there is no comeback, right? You just have to put in enough ‘gives the impression’ and ‘rumoured to’ and ‘it is said’ to deflect any libel charges.

“As a taxi driver told me on the way to the airport” was the old hack way of giving an opinion. Now, we brave, easily-bought scribblers and panting mouth-breathers can forget the dumb taxi driver. I have juicy factual opinions all of my own!

I just want to be like that Polly woman who once wrote an article imagining Gordon Brown as a viking warrior. Well, you get your bed-time fantasies where you can, I suppose and Mills and Boon doesn’t pay nearly as much as the Groaner.

Power without responsibility was said about journalism even when they were trying a little harder to be fair, and just report news.

The first casualty in war is the truth, goes the old saying. Well, we seem to be very much at war with our elite and their fawning writers and broadcasters.

“Almost nobody from the chattering classes has bothered to identify and understand the political forces that plucked Trump from the primaries and propelled him to the White House, nor the rot that has set into the established political parties in the US which played an equally important role.”

The chattering classes are so divided from the proles that they really have no clue any longer. I suspect that journalism is going through the same death throes as gallery art, theatre and non-technical university, that a new technology surpassed them and the grafters have gone elsewhere, found something else to do, and what is left is a bunch of stupid rich kids and charlatans.

Most of the media is privately educated, university educated, never done any other job, rarely if ever left London. They cannot comprehend the mindset of plumbers and carpenters in Swindon, or in the case of the USA, Ohio. They assume that Brexit or Trump or Thatcher or whatever are aberrations that came about because someone cheated or played dirty because there’s no possible way that sane people could have voted for them. And they aren’t even curious enough to think about what motivates those people.

Kurt Schlichter recently wrote: “Donald Trump is a warning. Trump is the best case scenario. If you somehow depose him via your smarmy shenanigans, what comes along next is really going to upset you. You need to understand something.

I think the real risk to the US is not that usurpation of Trump will lead to someone nasty from the right coming to the fore, but someone from the left. Someone who will take advantage of a racially and socially Balkanised society and paint the rainbow flag on a jackboot.

We might laugh at snowflakes, but when they are making the rules and have the power of the state to enforce their will, then we will be in trouble. We know that for them contrary opinions equal violence, so the imposition of violence on the opposition will come easily to them. When malicious people firmly believe they are both right and good, trouble soon follows.

I’m not sure things have ever been that different in kind – it’s always been a 4-yearly ritual in the US establishment that the latest Republican candidate is literally Hitler. Even the degree of venom isn’t entirely unprecedented (the last time the Democrats were quite this worked up, it was about Lincoln).

Actually, funnily enough, the last point probably has even more resonance. Minorities in the US are more or less “on the plantation” in relation to the Democrats, they’re voting ballast for them. I think a large part of the venom is sheer panic, not at the thought of Trump being a disaster, but at the thought of him being a successful president, particularly if he’s successful in nullifying the Democrat advantage with minorities in the inner cities.

IOW, if jobs and education improve, and the black family manages to knit itself together again, it’s really curtains for the Democrats, and for the larger Left project generally. Similarly for whites and latinos, etc. (it’s just that the disastrous effects of Left-wing ideology on blacks have been going on for longer).

I think the rest is a smokescreen to fool the rubes, this is the big fear that’s driving the panic, the wall-to-wall flapping about and fearmongering: a successful Trump will be the death-knell of the Left.

The Economist had a similar cover, Trump using a megaphone that is a KKK hood.

Lots of creative, original thinkers in Europe.

As a rule, people in Europe, including (especially) their media, know next to nothing about America, and they lazily assume we are just like Germany or France, with people like Louis XIV and Napoleon and Frederick the Great and Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler in our political DNA–and that Trump is, if not quite Hitler, a Mussolini or a Boulanger.

We are an open society and it would be easy to get much closer to the truth, but they don’t want to.They still resent uis saving their sorry asses in 1918 and doubly so in 1942-45, and protecting them thereafter. They are ignorant and lazy, and they glory in it.

MC (above), finally, someone who gets it. I once wondered where campus crybullies and snarling snowflakes could possibly find jobs after leaving college. Then James Damore made the news out of Google, was summarily fired for CrimeSpeak, and I finally had an epiphany: big business loves them. They have already taken over the most powerful company the world has ever known, and many others as well. When states enact laws the crybullies in big business dislike, they crash down on legislatures. When a mere baker or wedding photographer stands up for their Constitutionally enumerated rights, they are bankrupted with lawsuits and laws which flagrantly violate the Constitution. All it takes is crybullies and snowflakes in the legislatures and judiciary, and they are already there.

If the People ever realize, as some have begun to, that the Snowflake Elite is playing by a new set of rules, the Rule of Power, and the People realize that the only possible responses are submission or playing by the new rules, we may yet see a civil war. The People may well lose that war, but it would be a terrible time through which to live.

The elites, of both parties, are not about to go away. There are billion$ laying about just waiting to disappear into someone’s ranch, beach house, or college education. And then, there’s the cars. Didn’t some agency in New York just discover $84 MILLIOIN MISSING?

Until we can crowd source government accounts, this is all meaningless. Just people trying to get someone in that won’t go along with the money stirring. Trump is that person now. He’s got his.

The solution is to defund Prog (1984) Ed in K-12, university and grad schools; replacing the anti-brain and anti-republic pedagogy with Western (1776) Enlightenment and its love of Natural Law, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

This actually needs to be done in every country of the world. Where do you think the Antifa protestors are made? In K-12. In university. In grad schools. Where are Bush/Obama/Clinton archetypes manufactured? In Prog (1984) K-12, university and grad schools.

The trick is to stop the manufacture of Borg Queens and Hive Drones, by replacing Prog (1984) Ed with Western (1776) Enlightenment and its sane precepts for Liberty in Civil Society.

If you think about it, this is the one fix that fixes all things… and enables all things ameliorated… to continue to be ameliorating.

Agree with everything except the part about Trump not finishing his second term. His support is holding strong in the states he won, and that’s all he needs to win again. It is more likely that we’ll have a few more Eric Cantors being given their walking papers than Trump.

The office I currently work from has a TV on the wall permanently tuned to CNN, thankfully with the sound muted.

Every morning (so I guess prime time in the USA timezones) there are a bunch of talking heads discussing the latest shocking “news” about Trump, helpfully illustrated for those of us on mute by the ticker line at the bottom of the screen.

EVERY DAY.

Looking at the CNN viewing figures, they aren’t changing anybody’s minds about the subject, and people are turning over in increasing numbers. The people they are broadcasting to agree wholeheartedly with them. They aren’t offering any new perspective, they aren’t persuading anyone with their analysis.

I have long believed that the two political parties in the US are not D and R: it is incumbent v non-incumbent. This is why I expected the election result that occurred. Those fed up with those in charge finally told them where they can go.

The reason Trump will succeed in my opinion is that while the elite — the left and those who claim to be on the right but are only interested in retaining power — love the people as an an idea, they despise people as individuals. President Trump loves people for who they are as individuals not as members of some amorphous group.

“It is the Deplorables that own most of the firearms in the US and more than half of the military and law enforcement are on their side.”

Forget law enforcement. They’re in it for the incomes and pensions, and will neither place themselves at risk for anyone nor disobey their orders, which come from mayors, city councils, and chiefs. .

The military, though . . . with a volunteer military, most of the enlistment comes from red states. The higher ranks consist of a lot of Obama types put in place over his eight years who would work for the blues, (especially the transgender blues), but the troops remain red.

Although, given that their driving philosophy remains “following orders”, I’m not sure what that gets us. Maybe just more humane treatment in the POW camps?

I think there are a lot of law enforcement that won’t (and don’t currently in subtle ways) follow orders from leftists mayors, city councils, and chiefs. Due to their structure in the US, most Sheriff’s and their departments tend to lean right politically.

I think the way a hot civil war plays out is that the right gets fed up with Antifa, BLM, and other groups violently attacking individual rights to speech, association, and assembly and finally fights back on a large, coordinated scale. It will happen so fast that the other side will not be able to “arm up” in time and the Feds will be late to the party.

There will then be some sort of legislative response that will be more Federalist/originalist in nature that will attempt to secure individual rights and restrict violence. There will likely be major changes in academia and the media due to this legislation.

mhj [ABOVE] said: “The Economist had a similar cover, Trump using a megaphone that is a KKK hood. Lots of creative, original thinkers in Europe.” Exactly, NOT.

Psychological projection is the constant pathology of the Left – wherever it is. That European media relies on the viewpoint of America’s declining Northeast makes them even more out of touch with the Rebellious class of Patriotic dissenters.

“As a rule, people in Europe, including (especially) their media, know next to nothing about America, and they lazily assume we are just like Germany or France….” True.

But one poll from last October 4th, 2016, told the truth. Asked if Obama’s two-term presidency was a success, only 41% said “Yes.” A majority – 54% if I rightly recall – said “No.”

How can you miss warning bells like THIS? (Other indicators on “Right track-wrong track” and optimism or pessimism for the futures, which ranged up to 70 percents from 2015 to 2016 – were glaring, BLARING pro-populist indicators!) SHEESH!

On that vein I think that the whole left v right thing is the old smoke screen used to trick and distract us from the real war that is being waged, which is actually between us and them and right now they are winning.

To quote myself, a post from April 2016: “if Trump’s electorate does not get at least a fraction of its wishes, a hyper-Trump will arise and won’t be amusing.” I claim no credit for the insight: I relied on Edward Luttwak’s ideas from the early 1990s.

I wouldn’t draw parallels between the US and Turkey because the similarities are but superficial. Turkey’s elites have bet on democracy, have lost and are paying the price – just look at the number of educators, journalists, civil servants and military officers imprisoned or barred from their profession. Perhaps populist democracy is a bad idea for urbanizing countries in general, especially if the rural population has deeply ingrained notions unacceptable in any decent city worth its name. The US Northeast had gone majority urban a whole hundred years before Turkey, not smoothly but not disastrously either (perhaps Comstockery was also a side effect of the too-recent urbanization). But the worldview, the sentiments and the religion of a Northeastern farmer have always been rather different from those of an Anatolian peasant.

A Turkish liberal can still find consolation in the hope that urban grandchildren of inland peasants will grow brains for independent thought and action. America is long past that stage. It went urban, went suburban, is going urban again, so it’s several cycles ahead of Turkey. The big difference is that “liberty,” “the Bill of Rights,” “it’s a free country,” “we have the First Amendment” are in (almost) every American’s bloodstream, in their DNA perhaps. Most of Trump’s voters, it seems to me, are natural-born carriers of these values, even if they are bigger on the first and second amendments than on the fourteenth. Erdogan’s supporters seem to stand for the opposite, for the most part.

“At no point did the elites… listen to his supporters to figure out why they were voting for him, and look at ways to persuade these millions of people to come on board with their own policies.”

That seems to be way May is doing here with Corbyn’s policies, especially over exec pay and workers rights. I think it’s a dreadful thing.

Which leads the question: doesn’t it all rather depend on how stupid the policies that are being proposed by the outsider are? Because if you adopt them, then there’s an overall drift in a stupid direction.

In other words, what starts off as a clever move to erode an opponents powerbase starts to look like appeasement.

Turkey’s elites have bet on democracy, have lost and are paying the price – just look at the number of educators, journalists, civil servants and military officers imprisoned or barred from their profession.

Yes, because they didn’t bother finding out who lived in their country and made up the voting population, instead preferring to convince one another that their own opinions were so self-evidently superior that the majority didn’t need listening to. I believe this is a similarity with the USA (and the UK for that matter) which is rather more than superficial.

Looking at the CNN viewing figures, they aren’t changing anybody’s minds about the subject, and people are turning over in increasing numbers. The people they are broadcasting to agree wholeheartedly with them. They aren’t offering any new perspective, they aren’t persuading anyone with their analysis.

The BBC’s the same. It’s just wall-to-wall, immature criticism of Trump aimed at liberals and lefties dressed up as analysis.

Which leads the question: doesn’t it all rather depend on how stupid the policies that are being proposed by the outsider are? Because if you adopt them, then there’s an overall drift in a stupid direction.

In other words, what starts off as a clever move to erode an opponents powerbase starts to look like appeasement.

Indeed, if you’re going to steal your opponents ideas then make sure they’re not disastrous ones.

But it’s less about giving the forgotten majority what they want than actually acknowledging they exist. The political establishment in the US, UK, and probably elsewhere seem to have no idea who actually lives in their country. Stealing opponents’ ideas to pander to them is a long way off.

But any idea not thought of by the elites will be judged as disasterous by them.

Your point about the ruling class (cos lets face it, that’s what we are talking about) not knowing who resides in their country is a fair one, but the thing I’m nudging at is that they haven’t the foggiest what the masses actually think and value.

May’s clusterfuck fat cat policy is as patronising as Jezza’s actions to free the proletariat, and both miss something more fundamental (and which i fist saw in China in the 1990’s). People don’t often want the government to help them, they want it to fuck off and do less. The exceptions that test the rule are immigration (get a grip on it), the NHS (avoid destroying it whilst making it better) and the Police (catch criminals, don’t hassle normal folks).

Pretty much everything else the government does is an inherent intrusion, and normal people want them to do much less of that.

The first person who gets this, and runs on a ‘Simple Government’ platform will do well.

Your point about the ruling class (cos lets face it, that’s what we are talking about) not knowing who resides in their country is a fair one, but the thing I’m nudging at is that they haven’t the foggiest what the masses actually think and value.

That’s exactly what I mean: I’m not talking about immigration, I’m saying that the elites have no idea who the hell their *native population* is any more.

Good article, and I mostly agree. I dont see Trump as Erdogan, but as a lot closer to a cross between a Tea Party repub, a normal conservative, and a populist reformer. Since I am a Tea Party repub, and so far have not seen any leftist stuff in the popular reformer part, I now support that strongly. As for Trumps supposedly horrible tweets, who cares. I rarely concentrate on what people SAY, but on what they actually DO, and so far I see Trump doing pretty much what a normal repub conservative reformer would do.

One thing about many perfectly normal non bigoted people being with the white nationalists, who thought they were going to a normal Trump rally. That is probably true, but I dont let them off as easily as you do. If I had gone to a Trump rally, and noticed it was instead full of white nationalists, KKK and Neo Nazis, I would first see the rally organizer and demand those people be ejected from the rally, and if he would not, I would immediately leave the rally. Seeing those kinds of people at a supposed Trump rally, and not immediately leaving, classes that person as the right wing version of a useful idiot, giving political cover to evil people. Same thing for any on the left who wanted to be peaceful, but saw those Antifa guys show up, they should have left immediately as well. On Trumps “there were some good people there too” comment, he should have made it clear that even if they themselves were good, staying at a white nationalist rally is a dumb thing to do, because once those people are there, it is no longer a trump rally, it is a KKK one. Same thing for anybody on the left once they saw Antifa.

That is probably true, but I dont let them off as easily as you do. If I had gone to a Trump rally, and noticed it was instead full of white nationalists, KKK and Neo Nazis, I would first see the rally organizer and demand those people be ejected from the rally, and if he would not, I would immediately leave the rally. Seeing those kinds of people at a supposed Trump rally, and not immediately leaving, classes that person as the right wing version of a useful idiot, giving political cover to evil people.

“That is probably true, but I dont let them off as easily as you do. If I had gone to a Trump rally, and noticed it was instead full of white nationalists, KKK and Neo Nazis, I would first see the rally organizer and demand those people be ejected from the rally, and if he would not, I would immediately leave the rally.”

So all the Black Bloc has to do is inject a few agents provocateur with Nazi regalia, and the rally is over, right? Any attempt to eject them would instantly be billed as “Violence breaks out at Neo-Nazi rally”

You missed the main point. The rally was to protest the removal of the Lee statue. That’s who Trump would not condemn among the Alt-Right crowd. He was talking about the statues when he said some were “fine people.”